A) Control and prohibitions:
Eliminating informality is the same as increasing control over society. This control, being digital, not only allows all expenses to be traced, but also opens the door for tax collection to be self-executed, and the freedom of consumption to be limited.
As an example, nothing would prevent you from being banned from buying dollars, even if your country’s currency is manipulated, you couldn’t. Or if you would like to buy more than X amount of products, or if you would like to postpone the payment of a certain tax, limit certain transfers or even freeze the money.
The rights that are lost here are Freedom and Privacy.
B) State Inefficiency:
A greater amount of income, due to this new tax coercion, has no direct relationship with a reduction in taxes. What’s more, experience says the opposite, the greater the income, the more spending. The higher the income, the less effort there is to resolve underlying problems.
In practice, the reduction or elimination of taxes has rarely been seen. An exemplary case is that of the Check Tax, which was born as an “emergency” tax that had an end date of December 31, 2002 and still persists today, having even gone through years of good times.
Higher incomes usually lead to a greater volume of expenses, gifts, manipulation and corruption.
C) Filtration of personal economic data:
A digital system that allows citizen control is based on data. These databases in the hands of other criminals could generate greater threats to the security of the individual.
In practice, the state has not demonstrated a great capacity to preserve personal data as shown by the successive data leaks of the National Migration Institute, RENAPER, Veraz, the Federal Police and PAMI just to name a few, as this one shows. graphic https://time.graphics/es/line/630567
The concentration of this type of data from the citizen’s economy in the hands of the state usually represents insecurity.
D) Adulteration of the promise:
Campaign promises do not matter, nor the apparent functions of computer systems, if the former can be excused or ignored or the latter can be modified by their creators.
In practice, all of the above happens, promises are broken and codes are modified to openly or secretly do more than their initial function. Even in practice a promise of limited issuance of assets can be modified, even if smart contracts or blockchain are used.
The leak of secret access for the NSA to almost all American software, and it does not matter what I say I will do with a certain digital tool but rather its technical capacity, the temptation of power and the changing needs or objectives of the political parties in office. , generate changes that do not fulfill the original promises.
In a scenario where digitalization is total, there is no physical or simple alternative to turn to, we are slaves to the change of promises.
What can we learn from cryptocurrencies?
As a person who has been actively studying the crypto ecosystem for 10 years, who defends the technological potential from his NGO and from his conferences the monetary, technical, economic and social debate, I can say that I do not defend Bitcoin but rather what can be learned from it. him, and let me bring some of the learnings that this technology provides on these aspects.
A common mistake is to believe that Bitcoin is what you see on its surface, a currency that rises and falls in price, an alternative to fiscal anonymity or a complex system that is incomprehensible and unattainable for the common citizen and the marginalized. Even within the crypto community, it is sometimes seen as an ossified and inevolving project.
But Bitcoin is far from that and is actually a social and monetary experiment that actively and constantly debates all these aspects that the MAD puts in check and more.
a) Inefficiency:
To give an example of the problem of “state inefficiency”, from 2016 to 2017 there was an active 2-year debate about the number of transactions that can enter a Bitcoin block.
To explain it simply, what is scarce in Bitcoin is not only the coins in existence, but the number of Bytes (digital information) that can be written for each 10-minute block, and since each transaction that is settled consumes a certain amount of Bytes, the debate was whether to expand the blocks or make the consumption of Bytes per transaction more efficient.
Finally, the most adopted decision was to make transactions more efficient and that gave rise to solutions such as Segwit, Tapsroot or MAST. This innovation would have been unnecessary or postponed if we simply expanded the space.
Necessity drives innovation and the development of solutions.
b) Control, prohibitions and manipulation:
Regarding control and prohibitions, the great challenge of cryptocurrencies, including Bitcoin, is to develop a monetary system that cannot be manipulated or abused by those in power.
For this reason, the software is open source, that is, it does not hide anything, it cannot be unilaterally modified, that is, it is decentralized and does not allow rules to be established that limit its free circulation.
In some way, Bitcoin assures the individual absolute ownership of their assets in addition to the certainty of their limited monetary issue.
c) Personal data:
On the other hand, these technologies are developed on the basis of pseudonymity, that is, the balances and movements are not associated with the personal data of the users, but rather these are revealed exclusively to the operators with whom the users interact and in the level that they are willing to provide.
In this way, there is no centralized database with personal data that can be hacked or exposed, despite the existence of enormous transparency in transactions and the ability to demand payment of taxes and fees in operations with legal entities that require the data. of the user of these, as happens in all exchange platforms, banks, the state and companies that allow trading with crypto.
Founder of the NGO Bitcoin Argentina and the International Conference LABITCONF
Source: Ambito
David William is a talented author who has made a name for himself in the world of writing. He is a professional author who writes on a wide range of topics, from general interest to opinion news. David is currently working as a writer at 24 hours worlds where he brings his unique perspective and in-depth research to his articles, making them both informative and engaging.
